You finally found her. You picked up an edition of the New York Post from a box this morning and she was on the front page, a child in her arms. She's Detective Benson, now. The article helped you find her. It told you where she works. You sent her flowers and a letter, to let her know that you're back in town. You wonder what her response was to that.
She's more beautiful than she ever was. You study her picture and grin. She cut her hair and dyed it, to lighten it. It frames her face and softens her a little. You remember the first thing that drew you to her - her height. You like tall women. You like being able to look them in the eye without having to bend over. When you met her, she was a slender five foot six inch high school student. And your waitress.
You grin at that. You and your moron buddies had crashed this corner diner, on a Friday night and this girl, in a little blue dress - a uniform - came over to your table. She had long legs, a nice body, a pretty face and long hair. Your stupid friends made a comment - something disgusting and sick and then, you watched her bite her lip. She was biting back something. It looked like she wanted to return fire, but it might have cost her the job. You stopped her, dealt out a couple of punches to shut up your friends and apologized. That was the first time she smiled at you.
Then, later, you went back and asked her out, after apologizing, again. She accepted and it all started from there.
You wonder if you should pay her a visit. Nah. You just got out of prison - you don't want to see the cops so soon, make them think you miss them on your ass. You don't want to visit her at the precinct, but you don't know where she lives. Then, the lightbulb goes off in your head. You can go sit outside the precinct and wait until she leaves and tail her. You've done it before.
You won't draw that much attention - you're just another guy. God gave you a brilliant mind. Your father was right.
Your doting mother has given you the keys to her car, until you get back on your feet. You don't start work for another week. You slip into the driver's seat of the old Ford - it dates from the time your parents were married and getting along - and start it. It still runs good - someone's been taking care of it. Your older brother, maybe?
Jimmy. You want to go down and see him and the wife and kids, but while you were in prison, he made it clear that he didn't want you around them. He believed the jury and the prosecution. You know what you've done - you've also done the time. Why can't they see that?
Then it hits you. You were convicted on five counts of Rape One. Nobody wants you around, because of that. They've all heard the stories on the news, from the mouths of the cops - sex offenders can't be rehabilitated. No one thinks prison has changed you. Your little sister Angie doesn't even want you around. But she's got kids and having Uncle Mike the Jailbird and Convicted Rapist around the dinner table isn't so great. Jimmy's got kids, too. Just before you went in, your sister-in-law Alex had a son - a little brother to your beautiful twin nieces.
Jimmy's daughters might know you, vaguely - they were about three, when you went in, but Angie's kids wouldn't know you at all. You don't even know their names. You know she's got two boys and a girl, but you've never seen them. Maybe that's for the best. Maybe it's better if you just leave them alone.
You've lost your skill at navigating the complicated Manhattan streets. You used to be able to drive through the city as well as or if not better than the cabbies. You get stuck in traffic for an hour.
It takes you another hour to find the 16th precinct mentioned in the article. The place is tucked away, on a couple of cross streets. Huh. Most police precinct houses are easy to find, but not this one. You park halfway down the street, close enough to watch, but not close enough to draw attention. You kill the engine and pick up the paper again.
The years have changed her looks a little. She doesn't look so young, anymore. She looks tired, in this photo, with the few lines spreading across her face. Her beautiful eyes are dark and hardened. The look of a veteran cop. Which she is. She graduated from the Police Academy in what year? '86. And she's been on the job ever since. You think about how long that is - she's been a cop for a little under nineteen years.
But the men still must follow her with their eyes, when she walks into a room. She's still beautiful. She's never had kids, you decide, looking at her figure. She's too perfect. If she's had them, she worked the weight off really well. You wonder if there's a husband to get in the way of things. You hope like hell not.
You sit on the curb, in the car for hours, silently, waiting. You smoke a whole pack of cigarettes, compulsively. It's a 'disgusting habit', according to your mother. It's also one you picked up in prison.
She finally steps out, at about nine. There is a man with her. Boyfriend? You wonder, silently, seeing his arm is behind her - putting his hand on her back. No. They don't seem to be close enough to be a couple. Is he a friend? Probably.
Wait a minute . . . Cops have partners. There's almost always two of them. Is he her partner? That would explain the friendly way they're walking out - close enough to be good friends, but not lovers. You've heard it said that a good partnership among cops is just like a strong marriage in the civilian world - they have their fights, but they always come back to each other.
She laughs at something he says. In the car, with the windows up, you can't hear that sound. But you wish you could. He stops her, when she reaches for the door of her car. A black Toyota. You fix the details of the car and the plate in your mind. He says something, his face serious. She smiles and stretches up to kiss him on the cheek.
You've never seen a cop do that. They must be close to that line between friendship and romance. He's not much taller than she is - they'd be perfect for each other.
You let her pull away from the curb and ease into traffic. After a minute or so, you start the car and follow her, staying back, keeping a car or two between you, but never losing sight of her. Stopped directly behind her, at a traffic light, you see that's she's tapping those long, slim, yet strong fingers on the wheel. She glances back at you in her rearview and you busy yourself with the dials on the radio, so she won't notice you.
You have an idea that she lives on the West Side. She loved that neighborhood. She grew up there. So she probably stayed there. You both get caught in a backup on the West Side Highway. After all, this is Manhattan. When traffic's moving again, she takes a turn-off and you do the same, still behind her.
She parks her car in a space and steps out, keys jingling in her hand, her scarf whipping in the wind. You watch, intently, from a few feet away, and on the other side of the street, so she won't suspect you of watching her. She's a cop. But you've outsmarted cops before.
She disappears from your line of sight - she walked through a door. You give it ten minutes, to be sure, then step out and cross the street. Her building's one of those with a lobby that anyone can get into with buzzers to each tenant's apartment.
You breathe a sigh of relief. Thank God and the city for the NYPD's crappy salaries. If there was a doorman here, like there seems to be in almost every building these days, you'd have had to answer to him and alert her. Her building hasn't gone through a 'flip' yet.
You study the buzzers, looking for a name. There it is. O. Benson. 4B. Now you know her address. But it still doesn't really get you anywhere. You need to find out where her window is. How the hell are you going to get away with that? Damn it.
You walk back out and glance up, absently counting the floors. One. Two. Three. Four. But just knowing that she's on the fourth floor isn't enough. You need to know the building's layout to find her window.
A light comes on in one of the units - the second one right of the front door on her floor. A shade is rolled up and you see her standing there, in the window. You shove your hands in your pockets and keep walking, looking normal. You're just another guy. One of the millions of Average Joes in the city.
You go back to the car before she gets suspicious and start the engine for show. After a minute or two, you kill the engine and find the binoculars you stashed in the glove compartment. She's not a night owl. She never was.
She turns out the lights, about a half-hour later. You didn't even notice the time going by. She disappears from your line of sight and you switch the binoculars over to the right - her bedroom window, you assume.
She undresses, without drawing the shades. She's either too tired to care or she's comfortable with herself. God, she's beautiful. Her body looks even better than it did when she was young. That's a shock.
Occasionally, you used to run into an old friend and his wife. Half the time, you didn't recognize the wife. She'd changed from the hot young thing your buddy married into someone completely different - a housewife with no figure to be seen, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and sneakers, complete with a messy ponytail.
But she - you close your eyes, remembering. The girl had the body to knock 'em dead. Never mind that face. Hard to believe that she looks better at nearly forty than she did at twenty-one. She turns out the lights and draws the shades. She's gone to bed. Now you can do some exploring.
It takes some painstaking work, under the cover of darkness to find her fire escape. But when you finally do find it, you feel a little bit triumphant. The work paid off. It leads right into her living room. Tomorrow, while she's at work, you can leave her a little surprise.
She always liked surprises.
When you'd bring home flowers or chocolate or a cheap bottle of wine, to surprise her on a tight budget, she'd smile at you. It never took much to make her happy. The littlest thing would make that smile cross her face. It could be as simple as a single rose, when you were too broke to afford a full bouquet.
You remember Christmas morning with her. She was like a child, instantly awake the moment the sun started to rise over the city and turn the sky grey and never sleeping on Christmas Eve. You'd protest, loudly, but you liked to see her happy. So you'd oblige her constant nagging and pleading and pillow-thumping and get up with her.
But she was slow unwrapping her gifts. She took her time with things. You once asked her why, never meaning to hurt her. She looked at you, with those big brown eyes and sighed, the pain filling them. "It's habit, Mikey." She told you, quietly. "I didn't get that many gifts as a kid, so when I got them, I always took my time with them."
You hugged her around the shoulders and kissed her hair. You couldn't tell her that you understood the feeling, having grown up in a relatively normal, middle-class family, but you still could feel her pain. When she looked at you with those big eyes, whatever emotion was showing in those dark orbs went straight to your gut. Especially pain.
You wonder what brought your thoughts to Christmas and that particular moment. Oh, yeah. Her and surprises. She loved them. She'd never tell you what she wanted for a gift - she'd expect you to guess and surprise her.
Without her, your world seems dead. She was your ray of sunshine. You dragged yourself through everyday motions, forcing yourself to live and function, but it wasn't the same. You married, to please your mother and to try and ease the loneliness, but it didn't work out. Your wife couldn't deal with the fact that you were obsessed with another woman. You didn't expect her to. After the divorce, you went on living, always hoping for a glimpse of her, somewhere.
Every time you heard a soft, feminine laugh, or saw a woman with eyes the color of chocolate, you thought it was her. You knew it was pathetic, but you knew you had to have her. That you couldn't really live without her. You existed, but life was dull and dark without her. But she didn't know that. She was doing just fine, without you, according to her friends.
Prison life only deepened the pain of missing her. The ache deep in your chest. You thought it was going to kill you. Your mother sent you a package of things from home and you found that old picture of the two of you, when you were teenagers. It made the pain a little more bearable, having that old photo to look at and recall the memories. The good times. But the pain's still there.
You can't believe you've been nursing the heart she broke for fifteen years. You never thought this kind of heartache happened in the real world. It only happened in the exaggerated world of the silver screen. But you're walking proof that it does happen.
You think back to one of those good times you had with her. One summer, after you'd both graduated high school, you took her upstate to stay with a cousin of your mother's at his cottage on this lake. You swam together, you walked together and you tried to teach her how to catch a fish, to no avail. You took her out into this little town, where they were having a county fair, you recall.
You grin. Thirty dollars and an aching shoulder later, you won her a white teddy bear at one of those old carnival games. She held that thing the whole night, with one arm linked through yours. Funny what can make a woman emotional. It doesn't have to be expensive - it can be a simple stuffed animal.
God, any man who has her now is lucky. She's one of those women. The strong ones, who do stand by their men. Come hell or high water, she was right there, beside you. She'd be devoted to any man who treats her with the respect she deserves.
She stood by you through law school, when money was beyond tight, in that crappy little apartment where the cold air came in through the windows in drafts and the heat seldom worked. She didn't run back home to her mother, when times got tough. You had your fights. She was stubborn, with a streak of a temper. Push her far enough and it came roaring out. But she stayed. Until that day, a month before you were due to stand for the Bar.
You stop at an intersection and smile. She was beautiful, when she was angry. Her hair loose around her face and her eyes flashing and livid. Some men would have been scared of her, but you knew her too well. She had that gentle, open-hearted personality buried inside her - she'd never hurt anyone, unless it was beyond her control.
You loved her, for a thousand reasons. But her personality was just one. Another reason was that she was never afraid to speak her mind to you. She wouldn't hold back, worrying and thinking about things, instead of voicing them, like some women. If you were pissing her off, she'd plant herself in front of you, dig in her heels, raise her chin and give you hell, no holds barred. She wasn't scared to do that. If she was angry, you knew why, before you had to ask.
She never hid anything from you. Sure, sometimes, it took you a little bit of coaxing to get her to open up, but she never lied and never kept secrets. Anything she thought you needed to know, she told you. She was honest. And you loved her for that. You trusted her.
You hope you didn't do anything to hurt her. You never wanted to hurt her. You wanted her as your wife. You wanted her to have your child, someday. Any child she had would be gorgeous. Just like Mom.
She wasn't a churchgoer, but her faith in some things was unbelievable. Including you.
Four years of law school got so frustrating, with your father constantly breathing down your neck, throwing fits over your marks and complaining about his money going to waste. There were some nights, when you just wanted to say to hell with it and get a job washing dishes, somewhere. When you got frustrated, while studying, she'd look up from what she was doing and come over to you, to calm you down.
She'd even help you study and quiz you on things. Her own basic knowledge of the law from the Police Academy didn't help much, but she'd read the book and ask you the questions. She was intelligent and encouraging. She basically helped you through school.
You know she, too, had wanted to go to law school, once, but she didn't have a doting, rich parent willing to shell out for her education. And she'd laughed, once, that sitting behind a desk all day wasn't something she could do. She had faith in you that you could pass the exams and the Bar. She kept you calm, after a fight with your father.
She was one of those people. The rare ones that can calm anyone down, with a quiet word and a simple touch. You'd have never expected to see that quality in a cop, but she had it. You'd seen them before, of course. Your mother's friends, the nurses from the hospital where she worked and the shrink you were sent to, after your parents' divorce. The shrink you saw in prison was one of them, too. But you never expected to see it from her.
She was always throwing you curve balls. You never knew what to expect, most of the time. But you couldn't beat the feeling that she was made for you. You still can't.
